BBC World News, the national media organization of UK, is expanding its presence as part of its aspiring goal to reach at five-hundred million audiences by 2022.

BBC World Service is going to expand its services in eleven new languages which are Amharic, Igbo, Korean, Afaan Oromo, Gujarati, Tigrinya, Marathi, Punjabi, Pidgin, Telugu, and Yoruba in order to make it a total of 40 languages.

The long-term strategy is to produce video content in all these languages by localizing the existing content for the audience of all these new languages. BBC World Service is also going to create video and radio programming, bespoke news for many regions including Africa, Middle East, Russia, Korea and neighboring regions of Europe.

The best example of this sort of extension is Japan where BBC World Service experienced this push last year. It is also advancing digital means for bulletins and news such as local websites, social media presence, and TV programs for the partner broadcasters.

The company is planning to hire journalists for these regions with the objective of producing the original content, increasing exploration and the reporting to assist its audiences to know the world by explaining the ‘what’ and ‘why”.

Francesca, the Director of BBC World Service, said, “Today’s announcement is about transforming the World Service by investing for the future. We must follow our audience, who consume the news in changing ways; an increasing number of people are watching the World Service on TV, and many services are now digital-only. We will be able to speed up our digital transformation, especially for younger audiences, and we will continue to invest in video news bulletins.”

This is the largest ever expansion of BBC World service since the 1940s. It is funded by the government’s financial boost which was opened last year. The government committed to giving $42 million during 2016 to 2017 and $106 million every year from 2017 to 2018 to expand the digital radio and TV footprint of BBC World Service.

Currently, BBC claims that it has 350 million people in the world, but their goal is to reach at half a billion by the end of 2020. BBC will celebrate its 100-year anniversary that year.